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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27559381">Porthcurno</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandonato/pseuds/sandonato'>sandonato</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Beaches, Book 7: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Excessive Mentions of The Sun, F/F, Female Draco Malfoy, Female Harry Potter, Malfoy Manor, Pre-Slash, Semi-Catfights</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 19:14:42</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,575</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27559381</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandonato/pseuds/sandonato</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Then times passes, as is wont to, and March arrives with little fanfare, as months before it did, and Death Eaters find Potter and drag her along with her two idiotic friends, into the harsh cold of the Manor, its special stained-glass quality of doom. </p><p>Bellatrix looks so unhinged Draco fears she’ll kill all three in one rush of green glory. Fears that she won’t even have the patience to wait for their Lord to size up his prize first. Then questions are asked and Draco says, “I can’t be sure,” and knows even before she’s gotten the last word out that she’s made a grave mistake.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>32</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Porthcurno</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the beginning there is fear and a vehement denial of it. Their Lord’s red eyes, his short, white teeth. His high, wheezing laughter with its choking stops and starts; the most quiet thing, it seems, about him. Whenever he opens his mouth that wide, mostly in blazing rage or in the face of something he finds particularly funny (a mudblood pissing themselves from pain, for example) the back of his throat bares itself open like the palm of a soft-bellied toddler – pink and deceptively vulnerable. </p><p>Ordinary.</p><p>Draco has yet to come across anything more unsettling.</p><p>There are zealous followers of their Lord teeming throughout the Manor, walking down shadowed hallways from midnight meetings amongst themselves, and creating mysterious racket behind closed doors in the early morning, before the sun has worked up enough willpower to climb up into the sky. There are nights of successful raids; what almost every follower looks forward to, Dolohov and Lestrange and all the brainless, chaos-wreaking rest. And every one of them comes back from these raids heavy with the stench of dark magic around them. The earthy sizzle of it on their robes. They come back rowdy and plunder the Malfoy wine cellars, and litter the dining table with bottles and glasses – condensation rings – and terrorize the elves if there’s nothing more to accomplish that night. 

</p><p>Lucius watches their fuss the way one watches two snakes in the backyard having a go at it. Their Lord neither goes on these killing sprees nor leaves his rooms after these killing sprees have concluded, so Lucius can simmer quite obviously in his disdain and get away with it.</p><p>When the wine has loosened their inhibitions enough, they send beady leers at Draco’s chest (flat and bird-like as it is) and backside (not as flat, but not especially generous). They eye her like a slab of meat, pant at her direction like the rancid, foul animals they all are, and Draco blunts the intensity of their hunger by acting as if she is in the room alone. She sits with her back straight and gazes out of the closest window, though there’s nothing outside to look at but trees.</p><p>Bellatrix isn’t sane, and is gifted with uncomfortably enormous sheer magical ability, so that makes her the most dangerous of the lot. She laughs in symphony with the Dark Lord, a grating piece of music if ever there was any, her scratchiness weaving in perfect time to his disturbing wheezing. She picks the back of her molars with her wand if a mudblood’s being slashed open in the dining, and she isn’t the one doing the slashing. When it’s her turn to draw blood, she taunts her victims with every foul name she can think of, and whispers loudly in their ear what part of their body she’ll cut off next. It’s a production. It’s a leg. An ear. A finger. <i>I could wash that dirty finger clean for you. Yes, yes. Wash it clean with magic,</i> she’ll say, and hurl a curse at them when they least expect it, quick as a flash, just as the pain from the last dismembering has only begun to ease. 

</p><p>Draco’s stomach no longer turns at these demonstrations. She holds herself like she’s made of marble, because Mother hissed at her one night, “Everything is written on your face, Draco. At the rate you’re going you’ll get yourself killed.” And Draco rather likes breathing, even if life for her these days has been reduced to solely preserving it.</p><p>Then times passes, as is wont to, and March arrives with little fanfare, as months before it did, and Death Eaters find Potter and drag her along with her two idiotic friends, into the harsh cold of the Manor, its special stained-glass quality of doom. 

</p><p>Bellatrix looks so unhinged Draco fears she’ll kill all three in one rush of green glory. Fears that she won’t even have the patience to wait for their Lord to size up his prize first. Then questions are asked and Draco says, “I can’t be sure,” and knows even before she’s gotten the last word out that she’s made a grave mistake. Because Bellatrix is a skilled Legilimens, and Draco’s anxiety has made her careless as to forget that. The second after feels static, suspended, raw with threat. </p><p>A pause. </p><p>Then a bright flash of light, the smell of blood in the air, in Draco’s white hair, and the nausea that comes with disapparition achieved with more determination than destination in mind.</p><p>Then an expanse of land around her, a rushing sound in her ears, and Potter in front of Draco. Crying, and very much alone.</p><p>“Take us back!” Potter screams, looking much smaller alone. Most of her height can be credited to the volume of her hair and her two sycophants beside her. Now that she has in her possession only one out of three, she’s shrunk terribly, and has gotten a bit hysterical from this sudden change, and so fists her hands in the frilly collar of Draco’s dress as if Draco is the cause of everything bad to have befallen her, and not her own recklessness. Her own bad luck. “Malfoy, what the fuck?!”</p><p>“If you think I’m going to lay down and die,” Draco says, very coldly and quietly. “Then you’re mad.”</p><p>She doesn’t say that even if she wanted to, Draco has no idea how to <i>get</i> back. Tearing through the wards was a blessing of desperation at hand. Miracles are not miracles if they happen twice, and they only escaped by miracle.</p><p>“We’re going back for Hermione,” Potter states, both edges of her mouth twisted tightly. Draco swats Potter’s hands off her, pats her collar back into place, and aims her nastiest sneer Potter’s way when she discovers a tear. Potter continues innocently, like she didn't ruin anything, says, “We’re going back for Ron.”</p><p>“There’s a cottage that way,” Draco lets on, pointing at some vague dot in the distance. There’s nothing that way, really. Or there used to be, when they’d come as a family for a month long vacation in the height of summer, and Mother covered her skin with layer after layer of various sun-blocking charms, and Father hummed with great dissatisfaction as Draco crafted sandcastles right where the tide would wash them away later, all evidence of her hard work gone. </p><p>Trying to find refuge will be a waste of energy because it’s still too dark to make shapes out, let alone a lopsided, left-leaning cottage belonging to another time.</p><p>“We’re going back,” Potter insists. “Give me your wand.”</p><p>“We’re not going anywhere,” Draco says primly, meaning it. “Where’s your own wand?”</p><p>“I’m not leaving Hermione and Ron behind!”</p><p>“Stop bellowing! The mudblood and blood traitor are dead!”</p><p>It’s horrifically dramatic, but Potter slaps Draco. Hard. The beach they are on is made of white sand, and they leave footprints behind as they move about the shoreline. All around them, cliffs shoot up into the clouds, covered at the top by green tufts of grass, like moss on the shell of an old sea turtle waddling from sea to land. Draco’s dress is not warm enough for an early morning in March by the seaside. Draco is too close to a breakdown herself, to handle Potter’s.</p><p>She digs a fist into Potter’s breast deep enough to hurt, and is thoroughly satisfied when Potter calls her a, <i>nasty, pasty little rat-faced cunt</i>. In fear of getting dragged into a tussle, Draco scampers from reach. </p><p>“You’re a disgrace,” she spits at Potter, kicking sand right into her fucking face before stomping away.</p><p>“You don’t even know where we’re heading.”</p><p>“Merlin forbid. Who said anything about ‘we’?”</p><p>“He’ll probably kill your mother,” Potter calls behind her. “Your father, too, now that you’ve betrayed them.”</p><p>“Piss off.”</p><p>“Why’d you lie?”</p><p>“I said, <i>piss off.</i>”</p><p>“There’s no cottage, is there, Malfoy?”</p><p>“There is,” Draco snarls, spinning around. “And I won’t allow the likes of <i>you</i> inside. You can rot here for all I care.”</p><p>“What will you do after? Hide out forever until Vold –” Potter’s face scrunches in pain, then quickly smooths itself out. “Until Snake-Face kills you along with the rest of your family.”</p><p>“Don’t come at me,” Draco says, “just because you got your sidekicks murdered.”</p><p>It’s quiet after that, and they walk for a long time with no specific destination or endpoint. Everything turns yellow when the sun comes up, and a seagull screaches overhead, orange-beaked and hungry, diving for fish. Potter’s trainers drag in the sand. Draco carries her shoes by hand once her blisters start rubbing against each other, and continues the rest of their trek in her tights.</p><p>The horizon is long in an anxiety-inducing type of way, so Draco stops to be induced. She thinks all her efforts to stay alive will be efforts made in vain, at the end of the day, and watches the seagull fly away with its meal, nothing in Draco’s own mouth but the metallic taste of regret. Potter collapses just as Draco’s becoming disillusioned by the sky. She topples to the ground like all the strings holding her up have been cut with an elegantly worded <i>diffindo.</i></p><p>She’s on her knees, heaving and crying and looking small while doing so. </p><p>Nothing this small can save anyone, Draco thinks with a faint sense of pity, then walks over to lend Potter some of her height.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Sadly, un-britpicked and un-betaed. I wrote this to reduce my mounting uni stress. Credit where credit is due; <i>'moss on the shell of an old sea turtle'</i> is paraphrased from a line in <i>Dandelions</i>, by Yasunari Kawabata. If you've read this far, thank you!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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